Archive for the Costumes Category

The CTGML Facebook Group is up. To the 43% of people who voted in my survey that I shouldn’t start it because it’s a “stupid idea,” sorry. I hate Web 2.0, too, but I hate everything new. Like, if I had been around at the dawn of ink-and-paper writing, I would’ve been all like “God, this sucks! Why can’t we just keep using cuneiform?” Had I been alive in the waning days of the bronze age, I would have proclaimed iron to be “ridiculous.” Seriously, join my Facebook group. The most intelligent people on the internet read this blog, so we’ll have some great discussions there. Possible features the group will include:

— Post links to sexy clothes and hot sales you find online!

— Get fashion advice from lots of stylish ladies! (Straight dudes, this feature could be especially useful to you)

— Official CTGML discussion thread on pickup lines for women to use on men! (Straight dudes, you can help us out here)

Anyway. I encountered the following in Hannah Holmes’ bookThe Well-Dressed Ape: “While some researchers see copulation as the culmination of the negotiations, others suspect it may be just another way for animals to gauge one another’s quality…. Why [do people like to have sex all the time]? Is it a test of a partner’s quality? Some theorists think a roll in the hay might be a good way to gauge another human’s health and personality.” Sound familiar, ladies? Little did you know that all your casual sex was a brilliant Darwinian strategy.

But the tactic of hookup-as-relationship-test works even if your pairing is unlikely to produce offspring. Like the subjects of today’s story, “Heidi,” a musician, and “Gretchen,” a friend of the dudes in Heidi’s band. The two of them moved in the same social circles, and finally met one night last October, at a sleazy local dive bar (“The Buckaroo”). Gretchen is tall and skinny, “very androgynous,” and it seems Heidi was attracted right from the beginning. That night, it happened to be Gretchen’s birthday, and the whole gang ended up going to a different, moderately less dive-y bar to celebrate. “I bought her a shot of whiskey.” Along with Levi’s jeans and Chucks, Heidi was wearing an airbrushed Cher t-shirt that said “Gurlz rule.” Gretchen was a fellow appreciator of Cher, so this helped them build rapport.

Sonny & Cher

Another one

At the end of the evening, “we just crashed on a friend’s couch.” A dude who lived nearby offered up his couch and floors to the few who were still out partying. Hooking up came fairly naturally once they were in a room together. Heidi was lying on a blanket on the floor, and said “do you wanna lay down here?” They ended up fooling around. She says “it was great sexy times.”

Three or four days passed before they saw each other again. This time, it was Halloween. Heidi and her friends went out to a dance party being held in a warehouse. She was disguised as Ursula from the Little Mermaid, in full purple body paint, silver spray-painted hair, and tentacles constructed from pantyhose filled with packing peanuts.

Heidi is slimmer than this, though

She was wearing a black skirt with some sort of halter top, accessorized with a golden crown and trident, and red lipstick.

Gold crown

(I had, like, heck of problems finding the right kind of trident online. Free market, my ass. You’re on your own with this one.)

YSL red lipstick

As Heidi walked into the warehouse, the music hit a lull, “everyone in the room turned and stared at me, and it was like, ‘Yes!'” Among those at the party, “this particular girl turned and noticed me.” Gretchen was dressed as Ziggy Stardust. She was wearing tight jeans with a ball of yarn in the crotch, and had the lightning bolt painted on her face. They ended up dancing for a bit to “raunchy hip-hop” that the DJ was playing.

The party was “crazy.” Eventually they left, of course. Once again, they crashed at someone’s house, their friend “purple Siberian tiger” (for such was his costume). This is one of those cases where my notes are hard to read, but I think Purple Siberian Tiger slept on the sofa, letting them have the bed? It could be. Anecdotal evidence I’ve heard suggests that guys are only too eager to let lesbian couples hook up in their bed, if they get all horny at a party or something. It is one of the few compensations for the crushing burden of homophobia that queer people must bear in our regressive, reactionary society.

Anyway, having fooled around enough to verify each other’s quality, health and personality, they were ready to have sex. That’s what my notes appear to suggest, anyway. But I realized I wasn’t sure what that implies, since the distinction between “fooling around” and “going all the way” isn’t so clear in a lesbian context as it is with straight people. To gain insight into the “gay lifestyle,” I asked a bisexual woman. She says: “With a guy, my vocab distinctions would be: ‘I made out with him,’ or ‘ I hooked up with him’ (which would involve oral sex either way, or finger fucking), or ‘I had sex with him’ (which would be like, regular penis vagina sex). With a girl, my distinctions would be more like, ‘I made out with her” or ‘I had sex with her.’ The stuff that wouldn’t count as much as sex with guys would count as sex with girls. Some girls might say going down is a bigger deal than fingering and that that counts more as sex.” Also, it “probably” makes a difference whether they’re fully nude. So there you have it.

The two of them continued to date for “a short while,” and then Gretchen cut it off, saying “I’m not really looking to date anybody.” Heidi has seen her around town recently, they’re friendly and everything’s cool. When I asked her if the clothes had any effect, she said “absolutely,” and that there were “many references” made between them while they were dating to the Ursula and Ziggy costumes.

— I was out the other night, and a young woman told me that the lacy fingerless gloves she was wearing were a turn-on for men, and that she had been asked to keep them on during sex. I wanted to test this idea “in the field,” like a true pickup artist would do, so she agreed to let me borrow them for a few minutes. (I was drunk, so I didn’t think about the hygiene issue, although I probably should have.) I went and talked to an acquaintance of mine, and I gestured with my hands a lot, but he didn’t seem to want to have sex with me. The jury’s still out on the fingerless glove thing.

New reader “Audrey” is “a female undergrad at my very own Harvard of the south…. This particular sexcapade takes place on Halloween last semester.” She and her friends “were out and about frat-hopping and I was on the prowl, as I was just getting out of a booty call-based non-relationship, and the booty-caller was no good in bed. So I needed someone good in bed. Anyhow, I was getting progressively drunker through out the night and so was, well… everyone else.” I feel like the sentence “I was getting progressively drunker throughout the night” appears in, like, half the stories I post. It is starting to look awfully familiar.

“And so I was doing the nasty but obligatory grindy dance thing (with some guy I didn’t know), where you basically rub your ass against some guy’s junk to the beat of the music until his boner is poking your back.” Technically, that dance is known as “freaking.” It was the craze sweeping the nation around the time I was in high school, and the parents were all up in arms about how “freak dancing” was corrupting American’s innocent kids. (I seem to recall they were also worried that headbanging would cause you to get whiplash, especially if you had long hair. The 90’s were a more innocent time.) Freaking has indeed become so standard that no one’s even worried about it, but in retrospect, I think the adults were right. A person ought to have some time to decide whom they want to grind their crotch into. You shouldn’t just rush into a decision as soon as you show up at a party. It’s uncivilized.

Having an unfamiliar boner applied to your ass is distracting for most people, but it worked out okay for Audrey. It seemed to focus her mind: “I looked over and saw ‘Duncan.’ He and I were barely acquaintances but earlier that week we did have a fairly substantial conversation about hookah. Whatev, he’s isn’t really my type, he’s from New Jersey, and he’s too short. But as I looked over at Duncan (who was doing the same dance with some other girl) I decided I didn’t care how not my type he was, so I leaned over and ‘whispered’ (I actually had to shout, frats are in fact quite loud on Halloween), ‘uhm yeah so I dunno what’s going on with you and little missy, but I think we should hook up.'”

“This by the way is something that would never come out of my lips in a regular circumstance” (everyone always says that, too!), “so that’s why I was not so eager to repeat it when he dragged me outside cause he couldn’t hear me… so we just started making out.”

“I looked at him and said ‘you’re pretty good at this (kissing) and the rest is magnum-sized condom history.” Whoa, what a concept. You hear lots of variations on the phrase “the rest is history,” but this is the best one yet. The true story of Magnum-sized condoms and their wearers: the great unwritten chapter in the history of modernity. I mean if people will buy those books about The History of Baking Soda or whatever, imagine how well this could do. It would be the perfect stocking stuffer for everyone on your Christmas list. Why is it, anyway, that “history” always has to be about the most depressing topics? Why can’t we learn about shit we’re interested in? I mean, screw the Holocaust Museum, let’s erect a museum about… okay, you get the point.

Anyway, everything was fine “until the morning. As it turns out, Duncan lives in an all-boys dorm… and at 7 o’clock the next morning THE MOTHERFUCKING FIRE ALARM WENT OFF. So this would only be slightly embarrassing except that the clothes that got me so completely laid the night before were not exactly escapee friendly… I had dressed up as Tom Cruise. So all I had to my name were socks, my white granny panties, and a white oxford.” L-O-fuckin’-L. “So Duncan and I run out of his room (of course not fast enough to avoid clapping and hollering) and go hide. But as I said, I wasn’t wearing shoes, and my dorm was all the way across campus so then I had to call my friend to come pick me up.”

Today’s post may be a bit less work-safe than usual, if your work objects to your having sexual words on your computer screen.

“Philia” is Ariana‘s friend, and it was Ariana who told her that “when you’re older you’ll understand, sometimes you have sex entirely for the anecdotal value.” That’s what she did last Halloween. “Let me preface this by saying that Halloween in New York City is absolutely terrifying. Not in a “spooky” kind of way,” but because of the drunken crowds. “It’s essentially like being at the casting call for extras in a low budget porno except plus body paint and masks.”

Last year she got dressed up “as ‘Sloth’ from the Seven Deadly Sins (yeah , totally the sexiest one, thanks friends).” She was wearing “a grey and white slip from Urban Outfitters, some fishnet tights, also Urban Outfitters, and depending on which point in the night you’re talking about, a bra and thong.”

UO Slip

UO Fishnets

She and the other Deadly Sins headed out to the Halloween Parade, a “massive orgy of intoxication and drag.” Philia is probably quite a few yours younger than me, but I’m totally feeling her cranky, obstreperous attitude in this part of the story: “After several minutes I decided that this just wasn’t going to work for me. As it turns out, I hate people…who knew?” She needed to escape for her friends’ “brewing drama,” and she had a clever backup plan. She had exchanged numbers with a dude named “Miles” at a bar in Union Square a couple of weeks previously. They met through mutual friends or something, and he was pretty hot, with brown hair and a runner’s body.

She phoned him up and “we met at the Fat Cat on Christopher Street in the West Village (an interesting crowd there — including a guy dressed as a scuba diver witha tank full of alcohol drinking it out of a scuba mouthpiece).” HEY, THAT IS A GREAT IDEA. Not just for Halloween, though.

“So Miles and I had a few drinks and eventually I decided to bring him back to my place (hey, it was Halloween, I was creating a memory, okay?).” How come chicks always use that as an excuse for sleeping with some guy? You don’t even need an excuse, but if you did, I think you should use the Andrew Marvell “To His Coy Mistress” “fear of death” rationale. “Oh, I had to sleep with him, I realized that all my quaint honor’s gonna end up turned to dust anyway! He was hot, and besides, all around me lie deserts of vast eternity.” The end result is the same, but it’s a classier line of argument. When they returned to the dorm, her roommate Ariana was there, and rather than languishing in time’s slow-chapp’d power, she was besporting herself with a young swain, “her usual frat-boy hookup.”

Sexiled! “I wasn’t about to let Halloween get me down, so we moved to the couch and proceeded to make out there.” Before things proceeded further, “my phone rang. I answered and it was my best friend (and also gayest friend, and also most wasted friend) “Marcus” on the other line.

“I’m on my way over. I’m here. I’m here.”

“Paul, you can’t just show up without telling me, I’ve got somebody here.”

“OHHH REALLYY?!” “Yes, really,” but “at this point Paul broke into tears. Seriously.”

“Paul, are you sad?” “MAYBE???”

“I sighed, but hey, we’d been best friends since we were 10, so I figured, bros before hos, as it were.”

“Okay Paul. If you’re sad of course you can come over.” Marcus wasn’t really on his way, though, let alone “here” — I suppose he was just being dramatic. Once Philia found this out, she decided to have sex with Miles while she waited. But “the sex did not go well… I gave him a blowjob first and he made me stop because he was going to come, so I was like ‘well… want to have sex?’ and he said ‘sure, but it might be embarrassingly short.'” Question: If he was going to do a bad job fucking her, what was the point of stopping the blowjob? Why didn’t he just come in her mouth? As long as I live, I will never understand people.

In Philia’s words, “I figured, how short can it be? We started and about 25 seconds in (yes literally), he was like ‘maybe i should just come now and then we can have sex later’… I said, innocently enough, ‘sure, i come easily {!} so just let me know when you’re going to and I’ll come with you’…. Sure enough that was enough to set him off so he yanked off the condom and came all over me.” HEH! How inconsiderate. Gentleman, I learned a tip about this from reading Ron Jeremy’s autobiography. In this wonderful book, Mr. Jeremy advises that if you feel you are going to ejaculat too early, there’s nothing wrong with taking a break by switching to a different type of sex act, getting up to go make a sandwich, or even running your dick under cold water! I’m sure the lady (or whatever) would appreciate it. There are so many reasons to read Ron Jeremy’s memoirs, that’s barely even scratching the surface.

RJ in younger, but no less hirsute, time

Their idea was to wait a while and have sex again, but then Marcus called to to say he was finally “here.” He didn’t have ID, “so I left Miles in bed and went downstairs to retrieve my wasted friend. As I came out of the elevators I saw my favorite guard, Demos, laughing hysterically and just pointing to the bathroom.”

“A few minutes later Marcus stumbled out. He was dressed as an Indian. No, not the Native American kind.”

“There he was, completely out of his mind wasted, dressed in only a vest, a scarf wrapped around his head, a pair of gypsy pants and with a big red dot on his forehead. Think Aladdin, but gayer and less politically correct.”

“We got into the elevator where we met up with Ariana, who was now drunk, stoned, and had what I’d like to refer to politely as ‘sex hair.’ Once we got into my room it became clear that Marcus wasn’t in fact that sad, and had instead arranged to hook up with one of our mutual friends… at my place. Yep, he’d invited someone over for himself…to my place.”

“And yes… he showed up.” About half an hour later “Sextus (dressed as ‘Pride’ — a.k.a. himself) and Titus (dressed as Donkey Kong) stumbled into my room.” She tried to warn them there was a guy sleeping in her bed. Then yet another drunken, hysterical friend, “Livia,” showed up. Philia got to work “pulling Livia’s clothes back on as she cried, while the boys talked and laughed at how drunk Miles was. I suddenly heard a loud gay shriek coming from the direction of my bedroom. It was Titus, running out, in his boxers:”

“PHILIA! THERE’S A MAN IN YOUR BED!!”

“Yeah… I know.”

“HE ASKED IF I WAS MARCUS AND I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO SO I JUST RAN!”

“Titus was pretty much under the impression that I had ‘set something up’ for Paul in my room… for the rest of the night.” This story is way crazier than I even noticed at first. Who gets suspected of being a procuress, in this day and age? Total Roman sex comedy vibe, which is why I’ve borrowed some of the names from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It doesn’t end there, either. She explained the situation, but “about an hour passes, and suddenly I hear yet another distinct gay shriek as MARCUS comes running from my room:”

“PHILIA! THERE’S A MAN IN YOUR BED!!!”

“He’d discovered this upon crawling into bed attempting to fall asleep. Yeah, my gay best friend crawled into bed with the guy I had just slept with. Awkward? Oh no, not at all.”

However awkward this situation was for Philia, “it could never be as embarrassing as Marcus’s walk of shame the next morning. The Gay Politically Incorrect Indian walking by actual Indians back to his actually Indian roommate and it dawning on him that he had spent his entire night prior to coming to my place hanging out with two actual Indians is really enough payback for me.”

Meanwhile, Philia’s hookup “was very forgiving of the fact that not one but two gay guys had prevented me from sleeping with him and then attempted to sleep with him themselves in the course of his one night stay.” She never saw him again, though. By the time their schedules matched up, “I’d gotten into a relationship with someone I’ve known since high school and had been seeing over the summer. We’ve been dating about two months now and it’s going great — Marcus hasn’t tried to sleep with him and the sex is amazing (and even lasts long enough for me to realize we’re having sex!).” Ouch, that is a harsh snap.

I always want to keep this website topical, so you’re a reader in a pro-Obama country (United States, Kenya, Indonesia, etc.) and you get laid on election night, tell me about it. I know personally, for a fact, that people were having victory sex that night. (I know this because I read it on the internet.)

“Rachel” is a university student living in Brisbane, Australia. She describes her motive in writing in to me thus: “I recently had a bit of a roller-coaster ride of a non-relationship with this guy, am currently at the stage of hating every fibre of his being, and have decided that to write it down would be therapeutic.” Actually, I think that’s what happened with most of the sad bastards who write in to me.

Rachel’s story begins when “I met this guy… I’ll just say that he has one of those dreamy names that’s always given to sexy fictional characters and that tends to make girls swoon.” I will call him Glenn. “I met him because we worked at the same restaurant for a few months. I was on pretty good terms with lots of the other people there, but didn’t know him too well – until a party at one of the other peoples’ houses.” Rachel had found at that Glenn was leaving the job soon, and she went to the co-worker party because “I kind of liked him.”

“I was at work that evening, and some people there convinced me to quickly go home, change and meet them to share a taxi once our shift was done. The problem: WHAT TO WEAR? You see, it was a costume party! After a bit of brainstorming, it turned out one of the boys in the kitchen had a sailor hat he could lend me.”

Sailor's cap

“Upon getting home, I changed into a CUTE little dress – bold blue and white stripes, halter neck, kinda flared skirt ending just above the knee. Combined with a denim jacket, flat gold sandals and (of course) the hat, I made a kick-arse sailor. So I met up with my friends and made it to the house party on the other side of the city by 11 p.m.”

Blue and white striped dress

Wrangler denim jacket

Gold sandals

Many of the other guests weren’t even in costume, and she easily outclassed them. “I spent most of my time at the party talking to/flirting with Glenn (and drinking), and by my fourth drink was sitting on his lap (of course). When he whispered all deep-voiced in my ear ‘meet me outside in 30 seconds,’ I sure knew what was coming. Glenn and I went for a ‘walk’ and ended up making out in the park across the road from the party. Can I just mention that it was the middle of winter and I was wearing a short dress, so despite the jacket I was FREEZING. It detracted from the fun somewhat.”

“After at a guess an hour of that, I saw a cab pull up outside the house and knew it was the one meant to be taking me alllll the way back home with the other people who live near me. Glenn was trying to get me to go back to his place, which was just around the corner and apparently had plenty of blankets to warm me up.” I would probably accept an offer like this — it’s cold in my house right now — but she declined. “He also used the somewhat flawed ‘what if I never see you again’ argument. Dude, I know you’re leaving the job, but we live in the same city and I have an email address and a phone.”

On the way home, Rachel sat “in dazed silence mulling over the events of the evening.” She ended up sleeping on a friend’s floor, and since her dress “made shitty winter pyjamas, I just about froze to death.” Probably, this was God’s punishment on her for turning down free sex and blankets. If that’s the case, there was more persecution to come. Rachel waited for her hot guy to contact her, but days and then weeks passed, and he didn’t call. He did, however, waste her time with some lukewarm Facebook messaging.

After a few weeks of this, she concluded he wasn’t really interested, she concluded that he wasn’t really interested, so “when I was asked out by another friend (also a friend of Glenn’s) I didn’t see any reason to say no. This resulted in Glenn getting really angry/stroppy at me and his friend, because apparently despite not showing further interest in me and telling his friend that nothing was happening, he was *actually* just waiting for an opportunity or something.” What a dork. He was “sending me long angsty messages about how he had thought I was out of his league and wanted me to give him another shot (causing me much stress and guilt and tears).” She felt bad, and so she “decided I had made a terrible mistake and that I really liked Glenn. I decided the best option was to stay friends with the other guy rather than date him.”

When she saw Glenn next, she was out drinking with friends, “wearing a satin, cream-coloured dress with a colourful flower pattern around the hem and a gold belt around my waist, over black opaque tights, with black lace-up ankle boots.”

She was “extremely drunk (and thus emotional). We had a talk, which I can remember little of as I have rarely been as drunk as I was that night. The talking led to reconciliation making out, at which point I decided it would be a good idea to hop in a cab and go home with him.” “*Facepalm*”, she adds, in an eloquent display of self-reproach, she adds. But how could she have known? “I kind of expected that after the whole fuss he kicked up when the other guy asked me out, he would actually… want to be involved with me himself.”

Instead, they returned to their pattern of pointless Facebook contact. “When I was particularly friendly or showed interest, he would tend to be fairly dismissive and make me feel like an idiot. For a few weeks a pattern continued of seeing him with mutual friends when drinking and making out, but that fizzled out too.”

How are we to describe a dude like this? Rachel writes that “maybe asshole is being a little harsh – but I was pretty mad that he was such a drama queen… only to get what he wanted and then be interested in nothing more than the occasional hook-up.” Hmmm. “Asshole” may be the mot juste. Glenn, however, is the one who actually has cause for regret. Rachel points out that her outfits at the time were “fantastically cute. And that’s what matters.”

It’s been a long week, but CTGML is back. (Provisional joke, which I will rescind if everyone hates it: It’s time to stop putting country first, and go back to putting cunt first!)

First of all, thanks the The Scotsman for naming us “Website of the Week!” Scotsmen and -women, please submit your stories. Secondly, the winning Halloween contest entry. In the past, we’ve heard from Cecily about hooking up with an ex, then meeting her boyfriend in beery circumstances. Now she returns to tell us what happened to her on Halloween two years ago.

When it all began, she writes, “I was sick, some kind of mysterious death flu, and wasn’t planning on going anywhere. But my friend talked me into it, she had a great costume and figured she’d win this costume contest at a local bar. It was $500 or something, so I eventually agreed. The friend’s costume was ‘rock out with your cock out,’ a giant penis costume carrying a toy electric guitar. As to whether or not she got laid, I’d have to say yes; she’d been dating this guy who showed up paradoxically dressed as a baby, bonnet, pacifier, diaper. The baby was grinding on the giant cock all night (i know that sounds bad, but it looked worse).” Heh! “I wore the past year’s costume, slutty schoolgirl, which consisted of a prep school skirt and blouse with the embroidered logo, both purchased at a thrift store. My housemate had one of those fake knives that look like they’re stuck into your chest, which I borrowed and called the whole outfit ‘slutty girl who dies first in the horror movie.’ I know it’s bad when you have to decide what your costume theme is based on what you’re wearing.”

If you can’t find a crested blouse at the thrift store, perhaps you could assemble your own?

White blouse

Alexander McQueen plaid mini

They had two friends, “Nick” and “Nora,” who lived near the bar they wanted to go to, so they started out partying there. “They had a tiny baby who was dressed in a very cute Pooh bear outfit having just gone trick or treating. Nick had not gone trick-or-treating with the wife and kid, and there was a lot of tension about this. I’d met him a few times before and thought he was entirely too irresponsible to have a family. Anyway, we made it to the bars and copious drinking ensued.”

“I started talking to a guy dressed as a houseplant and lost track of ‘rock out with your cock out’ and the others. There were multiple bars and clubs with parties within the same block and it turned into one big crazy mess that you couldn’t even walk through. I ran into my friend Shaun. He had a paper grocery bag positioned at crotch level with the words “Free Candy” written on it. Inside the bag was some candy and Shaun’s dick (later that evening I saw him with some girl whose hand was permanently inside the candy bag).” So many costume ideas in this story. However, did he walk around all night with his dick inside a bag of candy? That sounds so uncomfortable.

“Being sick, I wasn’t having the best time ever, so I found Nick and asked if I could crash on his couch.” He walked her home and she did just that, but “a few minutes later, Todd crawled onto the couch with me. I said something to the effect of ‘what the fuck, I’m not going to sleep with you with your wife in the next room, dumbass.’ For some reason he felt the need to tell me all about his ‘open marriage,’ I didn’t buy it, I pushed him off the couch, got my stuff and left.” People who really are in open marriages are the real victims here; no one ever believes them.

But the people who write in to this website are heroes in their own way. If you’ve ever asked yourself, What the hell does it take to get laid? Why is it so difficult?, let this story inspire you. Sick, traumatized and sleepy, Cecily could have given up and sought out another place to rest. Instead, she returned to the bar. “I realized I could either feel miserable all night or drink until I felt better. I chose the later. At the bar I ran into Tarzan. He was wearing pretty much just a piece of leopard-print fabric. He was quite pleased with the fact that he was not wearing underwear — ‘cavemen did not wear underwear’ — and [he] showed me as much.”

“I’d always had a bit of a crush on Tarzan, he was always the crazy guy at parties who would get drunk and do something completely ridiculous. A few months earlier, we’d both gotten wasted and taken naked pictures of each other, yet somehow didn’t hook up. I told him the Nick saga and how I’d resolved to kill the flu with tequila. Tarzan and I ended up at his place. It turned into this very chill drunken fuck buddy relationship.”

I never asked whether these adventures cured the flu or made it worse, but it doesn’t matter. This story shows what an ordinary person can accomplish if they set aside personal comfort for a higher goal, and wear a really short skirt.

(As JMM from Talking Points Memo wouldtitleit.) This year, as every year, I dressed up for Halloween in kind of a half-assed way. I never get all that into making a creative costume, and furthermore, always sort of resent the implication that I should do so. But why should this be, I asked myself? The other 364 days of the year, I put a lot of effort into “turning it out.” Then I realized that perhaps that is the reason I resent the costumes thing. Just as New Year’s eve is “amateur night” for people who aren’t really passionate about getting drunk, so Halloween is “amateur night” for people who aren’t passionate about dressing to get laid. These jerks go out in baggy jeans and sweatshirts all the time, and then they expect a bunch of credit because they wore something fun and attention-getting just one night. You know how people say “make Earth Day every day,” or that you should retain your Christmas spirit all year, or whatever? So should it be with this holiday. If Halloween is about dressing to impress, then we must make every day Halloween.

“Samantha” submits this story, the second-prize winner in our Halloween contest series. (I only got like two entries, and the first-prize winner is ridiculously debauched.) It took place in 1999, while she was in graduate school at UNC Chapel Hill: “I was 23, and dating multiple guys (which I had never done); therefore, feeling very adventurous. I decided to recycle an old 1920’s flapper costume (a crushed velvet black dress with several layers of fringe) because I like that it was sort of sexy without screaming, ‘yes I want to get laid!'”

Black flapper dress

I didn’t like the shoes in this flapper-dress picture, so I went on the internet to find pictures of some hot flapper shoes. Something terrible occurred. I found out that actual 1920’s pumps were not hot. They were extremely dowdy. All thick, clunky heels, and uppers coming too high up on the foot so there isn’t any toe cleavage. Look here, or at the picture below. MATRONLY. People always talk about how great the fashions of the 20s were, but in the time that’s passed since then, our understanding of what constitutes a hot shoe has advanced by orders of magnitude. Fashion nostalgia-ists, you should be proud to live in the 21st century. WE ARE LIVING IN A GOLDEN AGE OF HOT SHOES.

She continues, “anyway, the guys I had been seeing at the time all flaked out on me, and so I found myself fairly drunk at a dance club (called “The Treehouse” no less).” She was dancing with friends and ran into “Chris,” whom she had met a few times. She knew him because he hung out with one of the guys she was dating, “Brandon.” Chris is “your standard Midwestern corn-fed type of guy — about 6 feet tall, medium build, dirty blond hair, blue eyes. Personality? Boring as hell. But this particular evening, he was dressed up as a cowboy AND he had just hurt his ankle so he had a crutch with him. Which, in my drunken state, made him ever-so-endearing in that “Aw, shucks” kind of way. So, we danced closely the whole night. He managed to stay sober enough to drive me home. I managed to stay drunk enough to ask him up to my room. We made out but given my drunken state, I passed out before anything really happened.”

White Stetson hat

Nocona cowboy boots

“I awoke the next morning with a terrible hangover and immediate remorse. I looked over at Chris and attempted to be civil. He interpreted my civility as, “hey baby, wanna have morning sex?” I gave him some courtesy kisses, but when he climbed on top of me, I just shook my head at him. ‘No way, guy. Not going to happen.'” Aw, how sad. “He was nice enough to drive me to work, though I did feel very awkward about the fact that he was good friends with one of the guys I was dating.”

And who were these other guys? “Mike” was a dude she met through her housemate and hooked up with about a month into the school year. “Then he started to freak out because he was a reformed pastor’s kid. Meaning, he went crazy during college and did lots of drugs and had lots of sex. So he thought he would turn a new leaf during grad school, and went back to being an evangelical Christian. Which meant NO SEX.” That’s one way to make graduate school even more stressful, I suppose. After she got sick of this she moved on to Chris’s friend “Brandon.” He was an older guy in her program she would hook up with from time to time. He totally lied about his whereabouts and went out with his other girlfriend on Halloween night. “Mike knew about Brandon and hated him.”